The Eternal Quest for English Proficiency by Angelo Meneses

Mandarin is currently the most widely spoken language in the world. It was born in a country which is now a booming economy and which is getting more and more important in the international scene. Still, Mandarin is not a world class business language. English is. Probably due to the fact that China produces cheap and in a large number components and not (yet) have a word in the decision making. The future will tell the fate of Mandarin.

English is still today the language for business. By ways of its large empire, English started spreading as a trade language that came to develop even more with the American assertiveness in the world. Today, English is spoken in every corner of the world, being an official language in every continent. So everybody is learning it. Latin used to be the language of an entire world, French the language of the intellectuals and German the language of science, but nowadays English is asserting itself as a universal language. Does this happen because English is an easy language? Or just because it’s already everywhere? There would be many different answers to these questions that are, in fact, not at all relevant. English is the most common language online, the most common second language and everybody knows, at least, one word in the Queen’s language.

Japan has implemented a program – Japanese Exchange and Teaching program – some twenty years ago, in order to bring the business language into the education system. Obviously, English was already there, but there are many challenges in teaching and learning English in the land of the rising sun.

It’s widely known that Japanese people have a natural hard time learning English. Mainly because of the differences in the sounds and the syntax. For the first, the katakana makes it almost impossible for a native Japanese speaker to read English properly. Katakana is one of the four Japanese ways of writing (being Kanji, Hiragana and Romaji the others) and it’s used to write the imported foreign words, such as bus or bread (read as basu and pan, as this last word comes from Portuguese). Many times, the teachers translate the reading of English words into katakana in order to make it easier for the students to read. The problem is that Japanese language comprises syllable sounds and not single sounds as English. This is, except for the vowels and the sound of , Japanese uses syllable sounds, for example, for , and so on. With this, Japanese speakers are tempted to read English with the syllable sounds of their own language, creating words such as redo (actually, red), ando (for and), cuto (for cut), shidi (for CD), among others. It’s the well known Katakana English.

The second reason – the syntax – is even more complex. Japanese doesn’t have a definition for masculine or feminine (although English itself doesn’t make the distinction most of the times), as it doesn’t plural or articles. The latter being extremely difficult to explain to English language students, specially the difference between a and the. And it’s not only this. The basic structure for Japanese is SOV (Subejct, Object, Verb), while in English it’s SVO, which often leads to a change in word order. Nothing to worry about after a lot of practice, though.

This article is mainly about the learning of English in Japan. And Japan is really trying hard with the program already mentioned. It brings thousands of people (currently over 6000) to teach English in Japanese schools (from elementary to high school) in a team teaching system. And all this can only be good, as a simple “exposure” of Japanese students to a English speaking environment can work wonders. The problem is that, many times, that “exposure” is not fully used. As every other country, there is a system in Japan. Language learning is still pretty much based on memorizing, repeating and translating. And this is more than proved not to be the best way. Improvisation and adaptation are. Most part of the test consists of multiple choices, translation or fill in the blanks, not including answers to questions began with why or when or what, therefore imposing a limit on improvisation, adaptation and mere interpretation.

Another very interesting factor concerning language blending, is the natural correlation of languages, leading to word adaptation. In English, everybody knows what the word sushi refers to, still the word is borrowed with no changes at all from Japanese. As mentioned before, Japanese tends to borrow words from other languages, mainly English, adapting them to its syllabic system but also shoretnening them and sometimes changing the meaning. Examples are depatto for department store, post for mail, mansion for flat, among many others.

Interestingly enough, there is another very important factor conditioning the learning of proper English in Japan: the electronic dictionaries. They are really common in Japan, but nowadays, technology does not take into account the language pragmatics and from this gap to coining new meanings or misusing words in specific contexts it’s only a small step.

Language pragmatics (the real usage by real speakers in real contexts) is closely connected to the natural cultural differences between English and Japanese. Despite the natural cultural differences between European countries, for example, it is pretty easy to find equivalents for most of the words or expressions throughout Europe. This is much harder when referring to English and Japanese, Simple words such as genki have different meanings, varying from happy to energetic and asking genkidesuka will undoubtedly be answered with a yes or a no (although almost all the times it’s the first answer!), while in English asking How are you? Can lead to a plethora of answers. It’s the cultural heritage working on a language.

This same heritage can lead to awkward situations as the translation of itadakimasu (a thanking for the meal, but not in a religious tone as common as in the west) and the over use nice to meet you or enjoy. Just words directly transported from Japanese and conveniently and automaticly used in English regardless of their proper use. After all, an English native speaker does not say nice to meet you every time it sees somebody. But, in fact, the verb to meet can cause some confusion.

But Japan is doing the big effort of teaching English from elementary school (where there will be an official curriculum very soon) and bringing internationalization (a very trendy word in this part of the world) into the communities. The same cannot be said, for example, about the United Stated of America. After all, a regular North American student can go through the school system without learning a second language. And although English might be the common language everywhere, billions of people are not born speaking the language. Just check the employment adds. And many American workers will certainly be overtaken by people able to speak another language rather than English. Even in their own country.